Sabeer Bhatia : Co Founder Of Hotmail

 

"Don't be afraid to tread new ground, but do a sanity test. " 

                                                                                                                 - By Sabeer Bhatia.

Who could have imagined that a simple young man from an upper middle class family in India would rise up to the global forum, finding a breakthrough web browser? Hotmail service, the world’s second largest Email service provider that took the world by storm is the brain child of Sabeer Bhatia, a man with simple insight into human needs that can be catered by technology.

Sabeer was born into a working class background hailing from Chandigarh, one of the best planned cities of the sub-continent. After graduating in engineering, he went on a foreign transfer from BITS to complete his Masters in Stanford University.

Unlike most of the engineering graduates who fly to the United States with the sole dream of settling down with a job, a condo and a dog, Sabeer looked beyond. He thought about the usability of technology in the mankind’s everyday life. During his stint working as a hardware engineer for Apple Inc. Sabeer understood the premise of the emergence of the new world. He was astonished as to how much a web browser could help, enabling people access the internet with a difference.

This thought precisely led him to start Hotmail along with his colleague Jack Smith in 1996, the time when the world was just about getting used to the ways of the virtual life. Hotmail was an instant phenomenon, with over 369 million verified email users to this day. People still bank on the Hotmail service, despite the fact that Gmail holds the strongest position as the front runner all over the globe.

Bhatia simply did not call it a rest. He had more plans with technology and ideas that could change the way people saw the use of internet. He led Hotmail service to a meteoric rise, until it was acquired by none other than Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corporation in 1998.

He continued to work with Microsoft, and later kick started another venture with them called Arzoo Inc. This was the very first of E Commerce companies the world had witnessed.The man on the run started another free messaging service called JaxtrSMS. The messaging service was started with a mission to change the way SMS worked, the same way as Hotmail changed the way people looked at Emails. The venture, however was not a very great success.

Sabeer continues to work on newer ideas, constantly trying to bring ground breaking inventions to the world. Despite all the success and attention that he had received, Sabeer had his share of personal setbacks in the form of a divorce that happened in the year 2008. He continues to rediscover stuff on the internet. Bhatia’s latest mission is an email collaboration software that he invested in, called ccZen.

Sabeer Bhatia is one of the names from India that puts the out of the box ahead on the world podium. Till date, younger engineers aspire to be the next Sabeer Bhatia in the making.